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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Ron Padgett was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 17, 1942. He began writing at the age of thirteen and started a magazine in high school called The White Dove Review with friends Dick Gallup and Joe Brainard. In its five issues, the magazine published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Ted Berrigan, and others.

In 1960, he moved to New York City, where he attended Columbia College and studied with Kenneth Koch and Lionel Trilling. Padgett later spent a year in Paris on a Fulbright fellowship where he studied French literature.

His first collection of poems, Bean Spasms (Kulcher Press), written with Ted Berrigan, was published in 1967. Since then he has published many books of poetry, including Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry; How Long (Coffee House Press, 2011); How to Be Perfect (Coffee House Press, 2007); You Never Know (Coffee House Press, 2002); Poems I Guess I Wrote (CUZ Editions, 2001); New & Selected Poems (David R. Godine, 1995); The Big Something (The Figures, 1990); Triangles in the Afternoon (SUN, 1979); and Great Balls of Fire (Holt McDougal, 1969).

He has also published a volume of selected prose titled Blood Work (Bamberger Books, 1993), as well as translations of Blaise Cendrars' Complete Poems (University of California Press, 1992), Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp (1971), and Guillaume Apollinaire's The Poet Assassinated (HarperCollins, 1968).

For his translations, Padgett has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and Columbia University's Translation Center.

About Padgett's work, the poet James Tate wrote, "Ron Padgett's poems sing with absolutely true pitch. And they are human friendly. Their search for truths, both small and large, can be cause for laughter, or at least a thoughtful sigh."

Padgett was the editor-in-chief of World Poets, a three-volume reference book (Scribner, 2000). For twenty years Padgett was the publications director of Teachers & Writers Collaborative. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2008 to 2013. He lives in New York City.

Lost and Found

Ron Padgett, 1942

What did I mean?First, that the beliefin divinity has almostdisappeared.

By dignityI meant mutualself-respect, the sensethat we have some rightto be here and thatthere is value in it.(Values are wherethe gods wentwhen they died.)

My dog Susie doesn’t seemto have any values, but she doeshave Pat and me, godsshe gets to play with and bark at.

About this poem:"In the pile of miscellaneous papers always on my desk I found a scrap that contained the words in this poem's epigraph, and I vaguely remembered having scribbled them down. That triggered the poem's beginning: 'I said that.' I liked the unusual idea of quoting oneself in an epigraph. By the way, the corny play on god/dog was unintentional."

Ron Padgett

by this poet

It's funny when the mind thinks about the psyche,
as if a grasshopper could ponder a helicopter.
It's a bad idea to fall asleep
while flying a helicopter:
when you wake up, the helicopter is gone
and you are too, left behind in a dream,
and there is no way to catch up,
for catching up doesn't figure
in the

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.